Monitor your website and keep it away from blacklists

Website blacklist is a thing from which even the most innocuous websites are not immune. For example, due to the fact that they happened to be on the same hosting or physical server with spammers, scammers and other banned websites. It’s enough to accidentally get into the same IP pool with them. Thus your website will also be in blacklists of some ISPs. Or, worse, the entire web hosting will be added to the DNSBL.

DNS blacklist – what is it and how to avoid it?

DNSBL, as the name suggests, is a DNS-based blacklist. DNSBL gets domain names and/or IP addresses. But the promiscuity of hosting for clients and the unfortunate fact that your website at some point turned out to be at the same address with conditional scammers are not the only causes of trouble. The lists are compiled according to several criteria.

DNS blacklist - what is it and how to avoid it?

Suspicious mail server activity

Everyone can create their own DNSBL list, putting it together with their expert opinion and experiencing all the shortcomings of their education and childhood grievances. It could just be the intensity of the mailing list or something more interesting. Its timely distribution, the use of repeated mailing lists, etc.

Incorrect mail server configuration 

This may be the absence of an important entry in the configuration. Or open ports. Or a potential vulnerability of the operating system on this server. The criteria may change over time.

Customer or user complaints

If you send a couple of angry emails to the hosting owner, the resource is often blacklisted. In this case, the previously mentioned indiscriminate attitude towards customers and users on the part of the owners of web hosting services practically guarantees that the violator will go “to the dark side” without further proceedings in two clicks of the hosting support service.

Ways to know if your website is not in blacklists and to avoid it

There are many DNSBL lists. But some have gained a reputation and some weight over the years. If the list really allows you to filter out spam or other unwanted actions, various services start using it. And the consequences can be very diverse. Emails stop coming or they automatically end up in spam. Visitors receive warnings about fraud. The website disappeared from some directories where it was previously in and so on. The result is usually the same – the website loses some customers.

Ways to know if your website is not in blacklists and to avoid it

It is important to make sure that the website is not in any of these databases. To make sure that a website, domain, or IP address is not on one of the popular DNS blacklists, you can use, for example, a quick DNSBL check provided by HostTracker. Finding a hit, the main thing is to react quickly. The less time the website will be in the list, the less likely problems will occur. They usually allow you to delete an entry automatically.

To avoid this manually, the HostTracker website monitoring service allows you to use regular DNSBL checks to determine if a particular website is in blacklists. Combined with extensive website stability and performance monitoring capabilities, this service will allow the website owner or webmaster to be constantly aware of the situation.